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Nintendo is dismissing rumours of an October launch for the newest Legend of Zelda title as nothing more than hearsay. From the GamesIndustry.biz story: "We haven't announced any potential release dates for the new Legend of Zelda title. Everything published to date is entirely speculation and we hope to announce more about the game at E3 in May."

The Zelda shown at SpaceWorld years ago was a tech demo that showcased progress on a previous, unrelated Zelda game. Look at the character model; it's very different from that of Zelda 2K5. It is the project that was put on the back burner to make way for Wind Waker.

Work on this new Zelda was started after Wind Waker. Aonuma-sensei has stated that this is a new project.

So this title has been announced once (@ E32K4) and delayed never. That is the deal here, fellow Zelda fan.

I wish they'd made a sequel to WW with the same style and engine. A true sequel, set a generation or two after the undersea bubble burst and the sea shrank, leaving behind much larger islands to explore... While I'll definitely get Zelda 2K5 regardless, I hope it's a sequel or otherwise an advancement of the story we've been playing and replaying for decades.

Back to WW: I loved the cell shading. The only thing I can fault the game for is its brevity. Anyone who says it's a kiddie game never played it or mu

I agree. One thing I don't like about most 3D games is that they can't be as relistic as the artists wanted. So they have to take shortcuts. So things that are round look squarey. I tend to notice these imperfections. However with cel-shaded games there are none of these imperfections. You know that the artists were able to express themselves as much as they wanted.
The one thing I didn't like about Wind Waker was how small the world was. Most of it was boring ocean. There was only one town. I would love i

Have you even played it? It is anything but a POS. Honestly, I'm kind of disapointed they went with the new look. The cel-shaded look was unique, it added style to the game and it looked damn good.
Ditto, WW was the first console game I picked up after YEARS of hardcore PC gaming, and it was such a breath of fresh air. The evel of detail, production values, gameplay...just wow.
The new Zelda does look very good, and I think the "standard anime" style works in that it places the game in a darker, more seri

It was a POS. It was Ocarina+boat+flute-horse. It was so easy I finished the game without dying. You rarely fought more than one enemy at a time; the first Zelda was more intense. They have been using the same puzzles since A Link to the Past. Yes this is all negative. Yes I expect to get modded down, but this is not a flame, its accurate information. There is nothing left in Zelda to get excited about, except nostalgia, and they are selling that separately for GBA for $19.99.

So, did you do this while religiously following the hint books so you got all the heart containers and a full stock of bottles filled with grandma's soup? Because for me, who didn't look at the book until after beating it the first time*, that final swordfight with Gannondorf really smacked me around, much more than any of the end fights in OoT.

* OK, I looked in it once: I couldn't figure out I had to shoot light arrows from the hip (sans L-targeting)

So, did you do this while religiously following the hint books so you got all the heart containers and a full stock of bottles filled with grandma's soup? Because for me, who didn't look at the book until after beating it the first time*, that final swordfight with Gannondorf really smacked me around, much more than any of the end fights in OoT.

I made it through WW without dieing once either, and only had to look one thing up online: how to get onto the ghost ship. See, they dropped enough hints about

And Majora's Mask was Ocarina-Adult+Masks+3 Day System. Wind Waker's innovation had to do with game structure more than anything else, once the whole ocean was available to you, the WHOLE ocean was available, and suddenly the game became less about finding the next dungeon (of which there weren't that many anyway) and more about wandering randomly, finding cool things. Which was the cool thing about the very first Zelda.

the difficulty has dropped off significantly since link to the past, not really an issue except i was disappointed when the ironknuckles in ocarnia of time looked badass but were pushovers in actual combat, in zelda 2: adventures of link beating a blue ironknuckle was always a challenge, especially with low HP's, but in ocarnia of time you just fire off a bunch of magic items and they die.

I'd say that Link to the Past also wasn't that difficult. The original Zelda's second quest was probably the hardest thing the series has seen. (Since then, I've always found myself hoping for a second quest when I finish a Zelda game....)

Oddly, I also find Nethack to be rather easy these days. Some players remedy that by setting "conducts" for themselves, purposely not using many of the game's features to give themselves a challenge. People have been doing this for Zelda as well (finishing the origina

I really liked the look of WW, but IMO it was barely passable as a Zelda game.
My biggest problem was the last half of the game, sailing around that damned ocean forever searching for triforce fragments and trying to get rupees to buy tingle maps. The warps helped a little, but it seemed to me that the game really failed where OOT shined, in making the world feel vast, but still dense.
The quality of the zelda games seems to be going down lately, OOT was really great, but Majora's Mask seemed a little rushed to me, it lacked the refinement of OOT. Four Swords seemed like an attempt to sell a crappy game just on the zelda branding (though to be honest, I never explored the game that much in depth).

Have you even played it? It is anything but a POS. Honestly, I'm kind of disapointed they went with the new look. The cel-shaded look was unique, it added style to the game and it looked damn good.

I agree. When I first saw the graphics to Wind Waker, I thought it was going to be awful. After I played the demo of Wind Waker I received from Nintendo Power, I was awed. It reminded me that games are not always about graphics.

After playing the game a bit, I began to enjoy the graphics. They don't distract

eh... this game was announced at E3 2004, which by my count is less than 1 year ago, so I'm not sure where you're getting your "4 years" from. Unless of course you're referring to the 'realistic Zelda' tech demo shown back at Spaceworld in 2000.

Furthermore, no idea where you're getting 'delay, delay, delay' from either... Nintendo has made no official announcement as to a concrete release date. They have said the game will come out in 2005, so until they announce it's coming out in 2006, you're delay acc

Instead of buying a system for one game, I'll just wait until it's ported to the PS2 next month. I don't need to be spending $100 for one or two games; when the new Zelda comes out that may be a different story. We need a real Mario game as well; or at least just port Mario 64 to the Gamecube.

Why not just stop by your local EB Games? They apparently already have it in store [ebgames.com]

Is pre-ordering a game really that necessary anymore? There was >1 million pre-orders for Halo 2 and I still saw plenty on the shelves when it shipped. I can even find copies of WoW in my area and have been able to since it was released as well.

Shortly after Christmas WoW was not available at most EBGames stores here in Houston. I had them check their databases and only a few stores had one or two copies. I was lucky and managed to nab one.

To your point though, it has been the first game that has been released in a long time where I didn't see it readily available on store shelves. Pre-ordering is kind of lame today so I simply never do it.

Much of the reasons for the shortages were genre related... Let me explain:

Halo 2 had no shortages, because for the most part people played at home, alone. It was simply a matter of getting more stuff out there.

WoW had to fully support every copy of WoW with bandwidth, GMs, etc. Through luck or poor planning, they weren't prepared for the success, and their infrastructure just wasn't ready. These things don't scale as easily as the "print more media" type games. To just print more would be to degrade the

Try finding Devil May Cry 3 in the first week. It's a balance of the initial expected sales and the actual demand. Sometimes way less sell than were expected (>1 million pre-orders doesn't tell you how many were duplicates by people covering all the bases) and sometimes early demand is even better than planned.

It's also dependant on where you look and where in the country you are. When you live in a metropolitan area with populations over a million, games seem to sell out more often. Shop at EB Games and Gamestop and you'll find they routinely sell out - and never know how or when they'll get their next batch. Drive over to Toys 'R' Us and they might have a few copies sitting around. Ditto for Circuit City or Media Play or Fry's Electronics, which are not primarily game stores... so they sometimes have a few copies sitting around.

Pre-ordering a game is only necessary if 1) it has reached a certain level of hype, 2) you know the store you go to is likely to sell out, and 3) you absolutely must have it the first day.

Bonus material for pre-orders helps, too. Wind Waker is the only game I've pre-ordered because the pre-order came with the Ocarina of Time disc. I didn't actually redeem my pre-order for Wind Waker itself until a month or two after it was released.

Pre-ordering a game is only necessary if 1) it has reached a certain level of hype, 2) you know the store you go to is likely to sell out, and 3) you absolutely must have it the first day.
And the fourth, and normally most important to me, a special item comes with the game only if you preorder (ie. getting Zelda Master Quest with Windwaker preorder)

My Solution (if you have a Fry's, and this is a 'hot' game that's just been released this week):

1. Look at the Friday's Fry's ad before lunch. If something is ridiculously lower than other places (including online vendors), continue. If not, then you might weigh HOW much demand there is for the game. If the demand is crazy (GTA)2. Go to Fry's during lunch on friday. You will get the game, 99 times out of 100. If you go after work, then the odds are something like 6 times out of 10.3. Play.

I live in a big metro (Bay Area), and I've always had the best luck with Best Buy for "hot new releases". I went there the day GTA: Vice City came out and while there were none on the shelves, they had an attendant in the games area handing them out to people who asked. I went there the day after GTA: San Andreas came out and they had piles and piles of them on the shelves.

Conversly, if I want a more esoteric game, Best Buy typically wont have it. They didn't have Beyond Good and Evil when I looked, they

The other time to pre-order is when a game is different and may be flying low under the radar. If there are no pre-orders your local shop may decide to get very few or no copies of a game. Preordering casts your vote that the game should occupy shelf space.

Indeed. This, apparently, is why Katamari Damacy had such a small first run in the US. Namco didn't take preorders, and they use the preorders to determine how many copies to print in the first run. No preorders means they have to guess, and unless it's Halo 2, they guess low.

Pre-ordering is never really necessary...and I work at a video game store. We were told to tell people we would have no extra copies of Halo 2 in order to get people to reserve it. It turns out we had boxes and boxes of extra copies that we continued to have until Christmas time was over with.

Don't worry, I'm sure there are plenty of other epic and exciting Gamecube games to fill the void between RE4 and when this new Zelda gets released. Please respond to this post with the names, like I said, I'm SURE they are out there. I'm just not sure what they are called.

Hmm...
Killer7 sounds promising, very violent 1rst/3rd person game with quirky art style.
Geist, FPS where you possess your opponents for new abilities.
Fire emblem, a great strategy RPG.
Then there's things like a new Donkey kong, and a pokemon RPG, and the usual multiplatform games from EA and the like. But Zelda will own all these.

Nothing really on the scale of a Zelda game, but when in the past few years has Nintendo been about Quantity rather than Quality? I'd rather have one epic every 6 months than a conveyer belt of mediocrity.

Right here. Nintendo has stated that the game is set after Wind Waker. If by sequel you mean that you want a game with a similar artistic style, try either "Four Swords" or "The Minnish Cap," (Four Swords is really only worth it if you have friends to play along with, however).

I'd rather them not actually have a release date in mind over the alternatives: A) Duke Nukem Forever it, where release date keeps getting pushed back again and again or B) Be forced by the date to release a half-assed product.

Now, mod me down for being a dumbass, but if I'm reading that quote right (no I didn't RTFA), that's Nintendo saying they don't know when their own damn game is going to be released. Doesn't this strike anyone as ODD?!

Not really. They really have no idea when it will be done; they're developing software, not making a burrito.

That's a way of saying "we won't tell you more until E3", the "we hope to" bit is just so nobody can say they made false claims should they not release any further information at E3. Just like every second ad has quotation marks around its message these days.

Advance Wars: Under Fire for the Gamecube. Someone posted above to watch out for this game, but this really does not give this game enough merit. Anyone who has played 2D Advance Wars know that these games are all about gameplay. All the richness of gameplay in a ThirdPerson Shooter/Pikmin style of control just blows my mind. What is amazing is that you can control helicopters, troops, and tanks! This game is coming from the makers of Call of Duty: Finest Hour and Shigeru Miyamoto. I think that this ga